Every since visiting the Whitney Biennial last week I have made several attempts to write a Minus Plato post about my experience. After several false starts, I kept coming back to one work: Portal, 2017 by Deana Lawson. It is not that at the time of my visit this large photograph of a ripped leather […]
How can you make a new proverb? Aren’t proverbs just old sayings, grounded in common experience, mere nuggets of popular wisdom, without origins, without authors? So when someone claims to make a new proverb, something interesting must be happening. Apuleius of Madauros, writing in the 2nd Century CE, renowned for his novel about a man-donkey, […]
Minus Plato presents: What Apollo Saw: Picturing Chris Marker’s Pictures at an Exhibition, 2008 – for Bill Horrigan Instructions: Click play on the video below Listen (it is very quiet, so listen carefully) Click in the white space below the video Using the down arrow key, scroll down s l o w l y When […]
I recently picked up the new issue of F.R. David and after a few years break, Will Holder’s project (which began over 10 years ago) continues to connect and inspire in unusual ways the interface between art, design and writing. Included in this, the 13th issue called “Inverted Commas”, which, among other delights, offers an […]
I just read Mirela Baciak e-flux post Footnotes from Athens which begins as follows: I spent four weeks in Athens starting in early February 2017. I conducted thirty interviews with people, some of whom have been living in Athens and working in the field of art for at least a few years, and others who, […]
At the 54th Carnegie International in 2004, in addition to four other works, Trisha Donnelly created a performance called Letter to Tacitus. According to descriptions of the performance I have read online, Donnelly selected an elderly male museum guard to read a letter that she had written, imagined to have been to the Roman historian Cornelius […]
Yesterday we returned home to Columbus, so it seemed fitting to end this week of posts on the ancient sites of New York City (inspired by Kenneth Goldsmith’s Capital) with the following excerpt from Adam Gopnik’s Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York: We will somehow escape Manhattan, fleeing like the last Trojans, […]
Goldsmith records the following source-less entry early in his “Antiquity”: On an Upper East Side roof top in 1956 a Greek nymph, clutching her lyre as she surveys the city, her terrace is a chapel, sacred to a Mediterranean cult of physical delectation.NJ I was unable to find an image of this rooftop numph, so […]
In his “Roman” section of “Antiquity”, Goldsmith records five entries on the grandeur of old Penn Station. (I visited the ‘new’ station this morning and there is nothing there to write home about!). One entry describes the design of the great Hall as a response to the Baths of Caracalla. Another singles out the ‘soot-stained […]
